


The Last One

by wallmakerrelict



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, I mean it, M/M, Mind the Tags, Sad Ending, The Arena
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21746749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallmakerrelict/pseuds/wallmakerrelict
Summary: Keith was on the Kerberos mission, got captured with the others, and fights in the arena alongside Shiro. Whenever one of them is killed Haggar clones him so the other will keep fighting.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 58





	The Last One

“Think this will be the last one?” Keith says as the arena doors rumble open, washing them in stadium light and unfriendly applause. He’s older than he was when they left for Kerberos. Shiro doesn’t know how much older. They don’t measure time in weeks or months anymore, but in the way their skin gets paler from life in a windowless cell, in scars, in the skinny white stripe cutting through the black of Keith’s hair. 

Behind Keith’s clipped tone and sardonic smile, Shiro hears the ghost of hope: maybe after this fight, they’ll escape. 

The question rings in Shiro’s ears as he plants Keith’s back against the wall and takes up a guard stance in front of him. He has very little hope left. He knows if this is the last one for either of them, it’ll be because they’re dead. 

But Keith, and that sliver of hope, are enough to keep him walking back into that arena. 

Their opponent today is a beast. It ripples through the door on the other side of the arena in waves of muscle and sinew. Short legs, slitted eyes, a reptilian head. Enormous. It stares dumbly and then, when it recognizes prey, lunges open-mouthed and spitting. A beast is easier, because it doesn’t think. But it’s also harder, because Shiro can’t out-think it. Only outrun, outmaneuver, outlast, outfight. 

“Stay back!” Shiro yells in the creature’s face. But he’s yelling it at Keith who stands behind him, gripping the dagger he chose from the armory and shaking half from fear and half from the desire to plunge that dagger into scaly flesh. Keith’s toes shuffle in the sand as he teeters on the edge of launching an attack. But at Shiro’s warning, he plants his feet and holds. He always wants so badly to throw himself into the fray, to burn out in one flash of bravery, and Shiro finally finds himself on the other side of the frustration and terror of trying to protect someone who doesn’t want to be protected. 

They circle the arena to the sound of spectators’ jeers, clashing again and again. The creature’s claws are wickedly sharp. Its teeth are rows of serrated triangles like the mouth of a shark. Shiro’s sword bounces off its thick hide as he fends it away from the boy behind him. He needs to get under those thrashing jaws, inside the reach of those grabbing talons, to rip the soft underbelly. But every time he tries, he comes away bleeding. 

He aims for its eye. It ducks, and the sword-tip catches on the scales of its skull. Shiro's arms are jarred numb. The hilt slides through his hands and slams into the center of his chest and he’s on the ground, sucking air, before he realizes he’s hurt. Hurt bad this time. Three rents in the top of his thigh to match the three claws that raked him, skin split like a rind, muscle showing for a heartbeat or two before it’s obscured by blood. 

He tries to get up. Shock keeps him on the ground. The creature leaps, triumphant. 

Keith leaps too, over Shiro, meeting the creature’s momentum with his bare feet planted between its eyes. When the creature reels backwards, somehow Keith is on top of it. He straddles its neck, gripping with his knees as it tries to whip him off, the whole of his little body bent like a steel cable toward its task. 

“No!” Shiro grunts, but his voice is as weak as his leg, which refuses to bear his weight, and Keith doesn’t hear him. He’s busy working the point of his dagger between two scales at the base of the creature’s skull, levering the armor plates apart until he finds flesh, driving the dagger in with all his strength and then hammering at it with the heel of his hand until even the handle disappears. 

The creature dies messy. The spike in its brain stem turns its body into a live wire, making it whip and convulse as it hisses out its last breaths. Shiro loses track of Keith. No, there he is, on the ground now, rolling to dodge the staggering feet of the beast that is taking an age to fall. He’s kicked and spun about and, before Shiro can get to him, pinned by one scaly foot big enough to cover his arm and half his torso. When the thing’s weight comes down on him Shiro hears his body break. 

Things happen fast then. The beast is down, but it’s between the two of them and Shiro can’t get around it to check on Keith. Guards in masked armor swarm the arena, wielding electrified prods to herd the champions back into the holding area. The crowd roars. Shiro can’t tell if they’re pleased the humans won or excited for how close they came to death. 

Keith is up and walking, but it’s not a good walk. He’s falling over and over and only stays up because each step catches him before he hits the ground, and starts the falling over again. Shiro drags his injured leg to keep up. They walk the length of the fallen beast in parallel lines, only meeting when they pass through the exit and Keith finally falls for real. 

Shiro catches him, swings him up into his arms and Keith groans, a weak little noise that would have been a scream if he weren’t so dazed and if the guards wouldn’t have hit him for it. He feels wrong. Something under his skin rubs and crunches like a gravel road and Shiro doesn’t think about what that means, just focuses on staying ahead of the guards, on keeping his body between Keith and those stinging prods, trying to make his protection mean something the way it didn’t mean anything in the arena. His leg feels hot and wet and about as sturdy as styrofoam. But it doesn’t hurt yet, so he takes advantage of the adrenaline to get them both back to their cell. 

The guards let him walk the whole way, let Keith rest in his arms all that time, only in the end to shove them into the cell so they both tumble to the hard floor just as the door closes behind them. Keith does scream this time. Shiro’s leg finally hurts, and so do all his other wounds, and he lies there for longer than he should. Both of them slowly let their breathing turn from sobs to panting, to gasping, to the steady drag of air into bruised lungs. 

“Your leg...” says Keith without moving any part of himself, even his lips. 

Shiro sits up to inspect it. The cuts are deep enough to feel like a vice around his femur, and the floor where he’s been lying is slippery with blood. “I’ve had worse.” 

Keith has worse. 

He lies still in the position he fell, too hurt to move. His right arm is a zig-zag with an extra joint between the elbow and wrist, and the shoulder is lower and lumpier than it should be. It would have made Shiro sick if he’d had anything to throw up, even bile, but his insides feel as dry as cotton and his retch becomes a cough. 

“My arm’s broken,” Keith says, barely a whisper. “You gonna set it for me?” 

They’ve done this for each other before. Set bones heal better. They hurt less the next day. But first, Shiro would have to grab Keith where he sits chest-deep in pain and push his head underwater. He doesn’t know if he has the strength for that. 

Besides, Keith’s lean little belly is bowing out, growing distended and tight. Filling with blood. His face is white as cracked ice. When he opens his mouth to speak, his gums are pale and his tongue is gray. Set bones hurt less the next day, if you make it that long. 

“I’ll do it later,” says Shiro. Keith answers with a breathy, “‘kay.” They both pretend it’s not a lie. 

So long as he’s lying, Shiro doesn’t feel bad for scooting closer to cup Keith’s face in his hand and say, “It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.” 

Keith picks up the thread of his false optimism, a mantra they’ve shared all these months, “We’re gonna get out of here. We’re gonna go home.” 

Shiro nods along as he smooths the hair out of Keith’s face, peeling it away from the sweat on his forehead, wiping the grit of the arena out of unfocused eyes with the pads of his thumbs. “That’s right, baby, that’s right. That was the last one. You don’t have to fight anymore.” 

Before, when the taste of freedom hadn’t yet been scrubbed out of his mouth, Shiro might have done more. He might have pounded on the door and shouted for help. Might have raged against the injustice of it. Broken his fists on the unyielding walls and strained his muscles trying to wrench the bars off the window. He might have begged Keith to fight an unwinnable fight while sobbing out apologies - that Keith wasn’t even supposed to be here, that it was Shiro who had put him on the Kerberos mission, that if Shiro could take on twice his suffering to put Keith back safe on Earth then he would do it. 

He might have done these things. He has done these things. They don’t change the outcome. 

Keith is breathing funny now, each breath starting before the last one is over, little grunts of effort as he sucks air against the pressure of blood pooling everywhere it shouldn’t be. He curls up on his side in a way that can’t be comfortable, but at least he breathes a little easier. 

Shiro matches the curl of his body and nudges up behind him, making himself into a cradle. There isn’t a way to hold him without hurting him. Shiro hovers an arm over him, not daring to touch, until Keith reaches up and pulls it onto himself like a blanket. From here, it’s even more obvious how round his belly is. Shiro’s feels hollow, like it’s caving in from something other than exhaustion and hunger. 

Shiro's leg throbs. Blood wicks through his clothes, making them sticky and clammy as he drifts off to sleep. 

When Shiro wakes up, Keith is as cold and stiff as cardboard. The half of his face upturned to the ceiling is paper-white. The half pressed against the floor, plum-red. He smells like stale blood. His eyes are a quarter open and bluer than they should be, hazy blue even in the pupils where they’re supposed to be black. He doesn’t look like he’s sleeping, because he’s not. Shiro doesn’t protest when the guards come to drag him away. His hair sweeps through a puddle of blood as he goes, and it stains the white stripe brown. 

Shiro’s blood-soaked clothes have dried to a rancid crust. At some point in the night his thigh managed to clot over. He finds himself disappointed the wounds didn’t kill him, and doesn’t bother judging himself for the thought. 

He tracks time not in weeks, but by the meals shoved through the food slot, by the growth of his fingernails and hair, by the healing of his leg. When the scabs start to peel, they open the door to his cell. Prods in their hands, but the threat of pain isn’t why Shiro stands up and walks. Stubbornness and defiance aren’t why he submits to a violent washing and haircut - making him recognizable to those who saw him fight that first time. His own survival isn’t what makes him return to that darkened holding area where the bloodthirsty roar of the stadium crowd filters dully through the doors. 

There in the dark: the one thing that could make Shiro walk back into that arena. 

He’s older than he was when they left for Kerberos. His back is unbent, his shoulders squared, his arms straight and strong. The white stripe in his hair is a finger’s width thicker than the one that painted the cell block floor in blood weeks ago. His smile isn’t happy, but to Shiro it shines out of his face like the sun. 

The arena doors rumble open. They are washed in light. 

“Think this will be the last one?” Keith says.


End file.
